I first encountered Sue Lloyd’s practice through her contemporaries at the time, Janice Andreae, Sharon Switzer, and her mentor, Colin Campbell. She had graduated from York University with an MFA and was already active at Red Head. Notably, she achieved early tenure at the University of Toronto in the Visual Studies Programme. Simultaneously, she single-handedly parented twins.

Since meeting Sue, I’ve included her work in significant group exhibitions like dreaming of you, for Garnet Press Gallery, (1994) Pool, (2001) for Harbourfront Community Gallery, Drowning Ophelia, (2010) for Gallery Stratford, Some Landings, (2015) for the CONTACT FESTIVAL and Carrying Wood, (2022) co-curated with Patrick DeCoste for the Aird as well as the touring two-person show breathtaking, (2001) with Kelly McCray, co-curated with Sharon Switzer for Gallery TPW; so arguably as a curator I’ve been invested in her work for decades and full disclosure, I also very much like Sue Lloyd as person too.

Lloyd’s Aird rabbit hole exhibit features over forty colour pencil and mixed media works that were intensely crafted at her “kitchen table”, that is, in a domestic space, while also attending to home and work responsibilities.

The works were created from just before the pandemic to the present. During this time, there was much staying at home, much combining of kinds of work, in one place. Many of the drawings in rabbit hole are responses to online calls for large group shows over the last five or six years: from the Aird Gallery; from the queer collective Throbbing Rose, calls for queer and/or women-focused work.

This exhibition, rabbit hole, showcases pieces, previously little seen or unseen, much like an unpublished collection of essays put together in an anthology.

According to Lloyd, a person who draws and writes, paper and pencil are used for both drawing and writing, creating the possibility of pivoting between drawing and writing in one work.

In the exhibition, the kitchen table acts as a bridge connecting the art, the artist, and gallery visitors. The kitchen table emphasizes the artist’s ongoing challenge to balance artmaking, writing, and educating, all while fulfilling her responsibilities as caretaker and homemaker. During the exhibition, the artist plans to use the table on Saturday for drawing, while the gallery is open for visiting, viewing, and chatting.

The content and scale of the work reflect how Sue engages with the world, embodying her ethics of caretaking and respect for the natural world by exemplifying her need to draw and write sustainably. By combining image and text on kitchen table-sized surfaces, she highlights the similarities between pictures and writing as starting points to explore and dream within the realm of feminist metaphysics.

Traditionally, words and pictures are often viewed as a binary. Sue has been working to break down this binary and engage in a non-binary approach.

rabbit hole examines how Lloyd uses pencil and paper, as well as how she employs visual elements such as colour, line, shape, and rhythm. rabbit hole also examines how these elements might relate to her word components, including their sound, meaning, and associations.

Sue’s rabbit hole drawings were created, in part, as problem-solving machines. They explore making transitions and seek ways to integrate writing and visual work.

ARTIST STATEMENT

1.

It is a deep pleasure to make the work, to work this way.

Immersed, daily: would be ideal. Drop down into that space, that flow.

It is a different part of the brain, a “thinking” that is not the same as intellectual thinking. Can function together with intellectual thinking, but can run on its own … wordless, nonlinear, it just happens, tap into it.  A practice, a discipline.

Thank you, ON KAWARA. Uninflected font: “24AUG,2025. I AM STILL ALIVE”.

Thank you, JOAN DIDION. Written observations.

2.

I HAVE BEEN FORMED IN ALL THE ART MOVEMENTS from the end 1800s through to the present. There isn’t one that hasn’t touched me.

3.

I have always loved photographs. In photo albums, in the dark room, in magazines.  Photographs (hard copy) were plentiful and everywhere.

I have always written. I have always drawn.

For a long time I have worked in collage methodology, across media, finding and recombining, taking apart and reconstituting.

Thank you, MARY SHELLEY, for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Thank you, CUBISTS and DADAISTS.

In the 1980’s I grew to love WordPerfect, (PC Word Processing software; Reveal Codes!). And then, in the 1990’s I grew to love PhotoShop. Powerful editing capabilities.

NOT your longhand hardcopy. NOT your typewriter hardcopy. Words, pictures, could be placed, then moved, then reordered. Digital technologies (and acrylic paint) were, and are, a GIFT to us nonlinear thinkers. GIFT to those of us who must revise, revisit, combine, compose.

But I have since devised ways to revise with paper and pencil.

Thank you, ROLAND BARTHES: “…a text is a tissue of quotations…”

4.

I am not currently making photo-based, photographic, art works.

Analogue photography is lovely but has passed: the equipment, the dark rooms, the chemicals in the water.

Never say never, but I have grown fatigued with making photo/art on computers: dealing with hardware, software, industry-driven prices and speed of development.

I want control over my tools. I want to make with my own hands, to see I am doing, to touch and to hold. I want to own and to access the means to make, store and output my work.

I am, so far, not interested in using A.I.

Thank you, GEOFFREY HINTON, for telling us, warning us, that A.I. needs to be taught to be a mother to us, to protect us, because this will be incompatible with the act of destroying us.

5.

I work, and live, locally, and in domestic scale.

I write in NOTES on my cellphone. I take SCREENSHOTS of other people’s posts and photos, to remember. I barely have photographic hard-copy prints of my family.

As someone once said, The best camera you have is the one you have with you.

Recently I purchased CLOUD space. Tickets to Heaven.

I have recently taken up, again, writing BY HAND, into graph-paper notebooks.

And drawing on handmade paper that looks and feels like an object.

FREE HAND SLOW HAND.

6.

Pencils, paper, wooden panels, acrylic paint and ink.

Compositions. Structures.

Writing. Drawing from memory., and mixed sources.

Things non-linear.  Digital and social media structures: tabs, pages, short things that are one-off’s,  but also interconnected..

Drawing lines. Thank you, AGNES MARTIN.

Drawing blue line grids. Thank you, PHOTOSHOP.

7.

I miss the materiality of analogue photography, of photographic prints, the materiality of many things, of everything.

THANK YOU, GUY DAVENPORT, for your discussion of poet, CHARLES OLSON, who wrote,

“We are alien from everything that was most familiar.”

GUY DAVENPORT: “We have divorced poetry from music, language from concrete particulars.”

8.

KINDNESS LOVE NOURISHMENT RESPECT GENEROSITY

FOR ALL LIVING THINGS FOR ALL SENTIENT BEINGS

BIOGRAPHY

Sue Lloyd works across various media, including photo-based, collage, drawing, painting, text, and writing. She has worked in both analogue and digital media. She holds an MFA from York University and is faculty in the Visual Studies Programme in the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto.

Lloyd has received Arts Council grants at all three levels. She has shown at, amongst others, A-Space and Gallery TPW (Toronto), Platform (Winnipeg), Kamloops and Presentation House Gallery (Vancouver), in Kingston and Rochester. She has shown at Fleischman Gallery (Rochelle Holt) and at AIRD Gallery and various projects/exhibitions, working with curator Carla Garnet. Lloyd was represented by SPIN Gallery in Toronto. He was a member of artist collectives, both project-based (Out of the Frame, GIANT-S) and ongoing collectives (Red Head), in Toronto.

Born and raised in Toronto, Lloyd has a long-term commitment to Toronto, to local culture, community and indie sensibilities. Experience in alternative education, in artist-run centres and collectives,

Her work and views are informed by, and rooted in, her experiences in alternative education, the queer communities, issues of neurodivergence and disability.